Rambles about stuff I like.

The Hobbit movies take a long time to not say very much.

Well, I hope everyone had a fun Christmas break. I’m sick of this break, finally I can get back to work.

So I watched the 2nd Hobbit movie. Man, does that movie take a long time to not say very much. The movie is 2 hours and 41 minutes long – 161 minutes! That’s fucking crazy! Especially since this is what happens: They get into a fight with some orcs, they show up at Stephen Fry’s village, they go fight the dragon, they let the dragon loose. That’s about 75 pages of the entire book! And we’re taking over 2 and a half hours to say so!? Christ. Talk about milking a story…

Anyhoo, inspired by the extreme length of the movie, I decided to reread The Hobbit to see what actually happens. I read the first couple chapters last night, which refreshed my memory about the utterly forgettable first movie.

In the first chapter, Bilbo meets Gandalf, then a bunch of dwarves. They eat and sing and then everyone leaves to take on the dragon Smaug and his fabulous treasure. That’s one chapter, about 30 pages or so. Took me maybe 30-35 minutes to read. I swear, that’s like the first hour and 15 minutes of the first movie. (I just checked, the 1st movie is 2 hours and 49 minutes long!)

Next chapter, Bilbo and the dwarves run into some trolls. The trolls are about to eat them but then Gandalf outsmarts them and so they don’t. 15 pages. This is a huge deal in the movie, but we probably don’t get to the trolls until after a shirtload [sic] of expository dialogue. Y’know, I’m thinking I’ll probably finish reading the actual book tonight – then I’ll have to watch the 1st movie again to see why it took them almost 3 hours to say what Tolkien took 100 pages to say.

Anyhoo, yeah. That Peter Jackson is determined to take 9 hours to tell 250 pages of story. That’s 10 bucks a movie – so yeah, he’ll be making his budget back and then some.

Doublehoo – I am stoked about the new Sherlock episode. I downloaded it yesterday, and will watch it some time today. I’m super-curious to see how he managed to fake his own death. Guh, I think it’s been over a year since the last Sherlock episode was released. That’s way too long to wait!

Welp, I’m still on vacation, and will be for probably another week. I imagine school starts next week, but tutorials don’t start until the week after that, so next week is gonna be a lot of me puttering around in my sweatpants all day.

Did everyone have a good Christmas? I got a bunch of awesome stuff – new slippers to keep my feets warm, lots of books, a new suit, some Christmas sweaters, plenty of candy (which is all gone) and some gift cards for coffee which I will almost certainly use within the first week back at school.

One of the books I got is called, “Ratline”, by Peter Levenda. This book deals with the idea that Hitler escaped after WWII to somewhere in Indonesia. The story goes, after WWII, Hitler and Eva Braun were smuggled out of the bunker to a U-boat, then they disappeared for a bit. (To where exactly is a bit of a debate.) But eventually, around 1954, they change their names to George Anton Poch and Hella Poch and land in Indonesia, where they set up shop as doctors and live out their days.

Aside: There was actually a German broad named Hella, and I think that name is hella-cool.

Anyhoo, Levenda puts forth an interesting case. First he argues that it’s not unfeasible that Hitler survived, since that’s what Stalin and the US intelligence communities thought, and DNA evidence on the alleged Hitler skull that was kept in the Kremlin was found to be of a young girl. Next, he examines the known escape route of other infamous Nazis, such as Otto Skorzeny, Klaus Barbie and Josef Mengele. In the last chapter I read, Levenda details the amount of Pro-Nazi sympathies that lie in Indonesia, and how some Nazis escaped with the help of various fundamentalist Muslim groups (turns out that Anti-semites tend to band together. Who knew?!)